One year ago 10,000 Oroville residents raced north from town panicked by the threat of a 30 foot wall of water gushing down from Lake Oroville within an hour. Soon, another 170,000 people to the south also were evacuated. The wall of water never released, but the near-catastrophe has highlighted long-standing problems associated with the design, maintenance, and management of California’s second largest reservoir and the nation’s tallest dam. The crisis and evacuation frenzy followed decades of criticisms about Oroville Dam and its associated spillways, distrust of California Department of Water Resource, and nearly 60 years of broken promises to the community.
This video shows the eroded primary and emergency spillways on February 12, 2017, the day the evacuation was issued. One day previously, the the lake overflowed its banks for the first time forcing water over the never-used emergency spillway. The reservoir was conceived in the 1950s as part of the massive State Water Project. Construction was completed in 1968.
Promoted in the 1960s as an Disneyland-like tourist destination that would bring millions of dollars to economically depressed Butte County in northern California, Lake Oroville never met a fraction of the promised advantages. Instead, Oroville and adjacent areas along the upstream Feather River watercourses lost communities, thousands of acres of taxable lands, and beautiful forested riverine habitat supporting salmon runs. What they gained was basically a gigantic mud basin that stored water for residential and farming areas hundreds of miles away in Southern California. Habitat was lost forever, salmon were halted at the hatchery below the dam. Native American villages and sacred sites were flooded. The train, monorail, 250-seat restaurant and 1,000-seat amphitheater promised in state documents never materialized. The reservoir was managed for distant water customers not for boating, swimming, or fishing. As a recreation destination, Lake Oroville was a bust.
Last winter’s record-setting high rainfall restored Lake Oroville after several years of the lake serving as the poster child for California’s drought. The desolate nearly dry lake was displayed in newspapers everywhere. The water level was so low you could walk to the interior foot of the dam on dry cracked mud.
One year later, the destroyed spillway of 2017 was featured on the front page of The Guardian as the poster child for desperate infrastructure needs in the U.S. unmet by current plans.
Trump’s $200 billion infrastructure fix is only 20 times the current estimated cost to fix just the Oroville spillway and associated facilities. Last year, DWR estimated $100-$200 million for repair, knowing the total expense would increase as the work progressed. The latest estimate is $870 million, but that doesn’t include all the work needed to mitigate the damages from the disaster and from reconstruction. The final price (not counting legal costs and settlements) will be well over $1 billion.
The accounting includes millions spent on debris removal, spillway reconstruction, staff time, the hiring of consultants, building roads, moving powerlines and so forth. It also includes money that’s anticipated to be spent. Another year of work remains to rebuild the spillway and fortify the emergency spillway.
Instead of receiving income from visitors traveling to dazzling recreation resorts, Oroville has financed water storage for use as far away as San Diego. To locals, it is the poster child of lies and abuse. The disaster and reconstruction will cost millions to the city and affected counties due to road damage by construction equipment, damage to the Feather River channel below the dam, and lost farmland. Land adjacent to the river eroded away in fast-moving high water when DWR hustled to lower the lake level and prevent the wall of water scenario. Because DWR is not stepping up to deal with these costs, lawsuits have been filed by affected parties including over 40 businesses and farmers, the City of Oroville, and Butte County.
The Butte County lawsuit against DWR is based on one of the state’s oldest environmental laws, Fish and Game Code section 5650, enacted in the 1870s to fight river pollution. District Attorney Mike Ramsey’s complaint seeks damages of $34 billion to $51 billion, or $10 for each of the 3.4 billion to 5.1 billion pounds of material discharged into the Feather River during the crisis.
In his complaint, Ramsey alleges that the DWR, in the 1960s, constructed Oroville Dam’s flood-control spillway without “sufficient anchoring and slab thickness” on a “highly erodible foundation” that did not meet design specifications. He also alleges that DWR “failed properly to inspect, maintain and operate” the dam….
The DWR’s release of water in February 2017 from the flood-control spillway, as well as down the dam’s emergency spillway, “caused an estimated 1.7 million cubic yards of material deleterious to fish, plant life, mammals, and bird life” to flow into the Feather River, the suit says. The debris included concrete, earth and soil.
In addition to lawsuits for damages, various groups oppose the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and DWR agreement for relicensing of the dam that was signed in 2006 but not yet approved by the federal government. The license permits DWR to operate the lake for another 50 years. Initially, the relicensing process included public meetings and reports, but then DWR insisted on secrecy and barred elected officials from discussing it with the public. After protests, DWR ultimately backed away from this position, but the long-standing distrust of DWR had increased.
In 2006, those signing the FERC agreement included water/power customers (e.g., Mojave Water Agency, the Coachella Valley Water District, Kern County Water Agency), and government agencies (CA Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Interior Department). The city of Oroville, the Oroville Rotary Club, the Oroville Area Chamber of Commerce and the Oroville Recreation Advisory Committee signed because they were promised money. Butte County and four local Indian tribes refused to sign.
"The county says the dam is a drain on the area, not a benefit . . . In the state’s eyes, Lake Oroville is just a place to store the southland’s water.
The state is benefitting. The 25 million people in Southern California are benefitting. The water contractors are benefitting,” said Butte County Counsel Bruce Alpert, who has been fighting the state for more than 20 years. “Why should 200,000-plus living around this facility subsidize it for everyone else?”"
Over the past year, various dam safety and engineering experts have pointed to flaws in the design, maintenance, and management of Lake Oroville facilities. Problems identified prior to 2006 during the relicensing process were dismissed but they proved true during the spillway disaster. FERC required an independent expert panel be appointed to review causes of the collapse of both primary and emergency spillways. The panel’s 584 page scrutiny of the disaster, released in early January 2018, concurred with the earlier assessments of other experts: Oroville dam was designed, built, and managed with flaws. Long-term and systemic failures by officials in California and elsewhere caused last year's crisis.
“Due to the unrecognized inherent vulnerability of the design and as-constructed conditions and the chute slab deterioration, the spillway chute slab failure, although inevitable, was unexpected ," the panel report [sic].
The panel also said the Department of Water Resources, which runs the dam, has been "somewhat overconfident and complacent" and gave "inadequate priority for dam safety." At the same time, the investigators said the entire dam industry, including federal regulators who oversee the facility's operations, needs to heed the lessons learned at Oroville….
"Although the practice of dam safety has certainly improved since the 1970s, the fact that this incident happened to the owner of the tallest dam in the United States, under regulation of a federal agency, with repeated evaluation by reputable outside consultants, in a state with a leading dam safety regulatory program, is a wake-up call for everyone involved in dam safety," the panel wrote. "Challenging current assumptions on what constitutes 'best practice' in our industry is overdue."
SacBee
Less than a week after the release of this scathing report, DWR Director Grant Davis (who was not with DWR during the spillway event) resigned and was replaced by Karla Nemeth, deputy secretary and senior adviser for water policy at the Natural Resources Agency. Seven months earlier, Davis had replaced Bill Croyle who was the Interim Director during the 2017 near-catastrophe.
Dozens of individuals, groups, and governments are calling for a delay in approving the relicensing agreement until all involved parties have time to review and process the forensic team’s findings. Two of those now asking for a delay initially had signed the agreement: the City of Oroville and the Rotary Club.
Following release of the independent review, the City of Oroville filed a lawsuit against DWR for their “culture of corruption and harassment” that compromised dam safety and led to last year’s evacuation and all the ensuing troubles. Once again, the promised money is flowing away from Oroville and not into the local economy. Construction work has brought added income for local businesses, but it’s a short-term gain in a long-term losing situation.
The suit says the failure of Oroville’s two flood-control spillways, which prompted the evacuation of 188,000 downstream residents, hurt a variety of businesses, landowners and others. For instance, grocery-bag manufacturer Roplast Industries lost $1.5 million because of lost production time during the evacuation. JEM Farms, a walnut orchard downstream of the dam, suffered $15 million in flooding damage because of dramatic surges of water pouring out of the dam during the crisis.
According to the lawsuit, DWR workers engaged in shoddy maintenance practices, which was covered up by supervisors. African-American employees were subjected to racist taunts by co-workers, which further weakened the workplace environment and hurt dam safety, the suit says.
This year due to the need to keep the water level down and not require use of the spillway, Lake Oroville is so low the shores are steep banks of dried mud. Upstream portions are trickles where once boats were launched. The lake’s recreational facilities are restricted and, in some cases, dysfunctional. The aesthetics of boating in a mud clad basin attract few visitors. As usual, little shoreline is accessible due to the low water.
Problems identified before the dam was constructed, complaints from the failure to provide recreation values, and the flaws in the spillways protested during relicensing have been validated repeatedly in the past year. But none has been adequately addressed or if addressed hasn’t been tested through use. Promises of income, development, and improved management are never met. Distrust of DWR is at an all-time high. Oroville spillway is indeed the poster child for infrastructure problems in the U.S.
In addition to all the linked stories (from other sources) embedded above, I’ve written about this situation since last February. Here are my stories in reverse chronological order. Many include photos/videos of various phases in the disaster and reconstruction.